Elspeth Probyn, Professor Emeritus of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney, died in London on 7 April, 2025 at the age of 67. She is remembered for the pivotal role she played fostering the practice of Gender and Cultural Studies in Australia; her path-breaking contributions to several interconnected fields of study — feminist cultural theory, sexuality, embodied ethnography, affect theory, cultural geography, cultural studies of food, and the ‘blue humanities’; her proactive and generous mentoring of students and colleagues as well as her energetic cultivation of intellectual community across the field of cultural studies.
Elspeth was born in Canada in 1958 and grew up in Wales, one of three children to Alfred John Probyn, a British army officer, and Calista Helen Probyn, a high school teacher from Canada. In scholarly interviews she has described her childhood as that of an ‘army brat’ who moved around a lot while growing up, attributing these aspects of her early life with her abiding interest in space and the differential embodiment of class. In 1974 Elspeth moved from Wales to stay with her grandfather in the Okanagan valley in Canada. For her Bachelor of Arts, she studied Fine Art and French at the University of British Colombia, before undertaking postgraduate research in media and communications at Concordia University.
In her Masters thesis, Elspeth analysed anorexia nervosa — a condition she had suffered in her adolescence — as a mechanism of control for women in situations of disempowerment. In line with longstanding academic conventions, she does not mention having been anorexic in the thesis. In subsequent work she reflects on how this rendered the topic an object separate from herself — ‘something central always seemed to evade me’ — an outcome she goes on to problematize in connection with her consideration of gender as a process that ‘proceeds through experience’ (1993, p. 3). Her PhD thesis, An Autobiographical Turn: Uses of the Self in Cultural Theory (1989) confronted this problematic head on. In it, she elaborates a set of criteria to evaluate uses of the self in cultural theory and makes a compelling case for the mobilization of the concept of the self as critical tool and enunciative practice within cultural theory. This work became her first book, Sexing the Self: Gendered Positions in Cultural Studies (Routledge, 1993). Sexing the Self provides a critical foundation for much of Elspeth’s subsequent work and scholarship, which typically proceeds by juxtaposing theoretical ideas with situated experience to ground the topic at hand as a matter of care, concern and interest.
After completing her PhD in 1989, Elspeth joined the Department of Sociology at the University of Montréal where she helped establish a cross-departmental program in feminist studies and wrote her second book, Outside Belongings (Routledge, 1996). The book exemplifies how the self can be put to work in connection with the spaces it inhabits to enunciate alternative possibilities of being, becoming and belonging. The first chapter opens with a description of the architecture of Montréal’s working class and former working class parts of the city, ‘strung together and defined by a network of balconies,’ that in the summer draw together a heterogenous bunch of inhabitants in a manner of living that provides a glimpse of alternative forms of cultural allegiance while nonetheless remaining completely ordinary. Elspeth uses this experience to ‘inspire a mode of thinking about how people get along, how various forms of belonging are articulated, how individuals conjugate difference into manners of being, and how desires to become are played out in everyday circumstances’ (1996, p. 5). Outside Belongings vividly demonstrates how the nonessential use of the self that Elspeth elaborated in her doctoral work could be put into articulation with diverse spaces, scenes, texts, materials and processes to conjure alternative conceptions of belonging and constitute a springboard for critical engagement.
In 1996, Elspeth was appointed Director of Women’s Studies at the University of Sydney, working with colleagues to found what became the much larger Department of Gender Studies and later, the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies. Elspeth served as Head of Department for several years after her appointment and was instrumental in the design of the department’s undergraduate curriculum. Here she worked with colleagues to establish one of the most vibrant research cultures in the university. She was a prolific organiser of conferences, workshops, seminar series and the like, and was highly successful attracting funding from the Australian Research Council as well as its UK, Canadian and Hong Kong counterparts, to conduct research on a wide range of topics — sustainability, taste cultures, citizenship and belonging, affect and ethnicity, cosmetic surgery — both collaboratively and as sole investigator. She was also especially committed to fostering and maintaining a generous research culture within the department, largely through curating research seminar programs as well as running regular postgraduate work-in-progress sessions that were remarkably inclusive of the highly diverse range of projects the department attracts and supports. Attendance — and thoughtful engagement with topics outside participants’ direct areas of expertise — were compulsory!
Elspeth supervised to completion at least 18 PhD students, many of whom now hold academic positions around the world. Her energy and enthusiasm for building research cultures was also brought to bear at a national level through the important leadership role she played as part of the management team and an active participant in the ARC Cultural Research Network (2004-2010), which fostered connections between established and upcoming researchers across the country and mentored a new generation of Australian cultural researchers.
The move to Australia led Elspeth to develop new lines of inquiry in her own research. Carnal Appetites (Routledge, 2000) opened up the terrain of cultural studies of food, situating eating bodies as mechanisms of connection to others. Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minnesota Press, 2005) explored the productive possibilities of shame. One of the first book-length cultural studies to emerge from the turn to affect, Blush drew on the work of the psychologist Silvan Tomkins to conceive shame as an affect that not only cowers but enables new modes of engagement and interest in others. Elspeth’s work on shame has been taken up in social and cultural analyses of healthcare, education, policy-making and alternative food programs as well as gender and sexuality studies. It was at the centre of the State-of-the-Art Mellon Conference on Shame and Other Affects at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Indeed throughout her career, the impact of Elspeth’s work was recognised in the form of awards, prizes, and prestigious fellowships throughout Europe, the UK, Canada, USA and Australia.
In 2009, Elspeth took up the position of the Research Chair Professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of South Australia, where she also co-directed the Centre for Postcolonial and Globalisation Studies and served as Director of the Hawke Research Institute for 18 months. Working with rural sociologists whose research concerned the drought-stricken natural resource economies of South Australia, she describes developing an interest in primary food production. A colleague encouraged her to visit the small fishing communities along the coast of the Eyre Peninsula where, she recalls, she ‘fell in love with fish’ and became ‘entranced with the intricate forms of biocultural sociality that weave through small communities that depend on fishing and oyster farming’ (2016, p.6-7). These experiences combined with her lifelong concern about how to ensure ‘global and equitable access to protein’ to spark her research into the human-marine interface which became the basis of her next book, Eating the Ocean (Duke University Press, 2016). Eating the Ocean was greeted as a game-changer for its methodological innovation and the novel approach to oceans and the production and consumption of seafood it elaborated. Like all of Elspeth’s books, it can be read as a deeply imaginative response to a process in which the authorial self comes to inhabit an altogether new material and conceptual space, changing the way this space come to matter in the process.
Elspeth returned to Gender and Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney in 2012 where she worked for the rest of her career. At the beginning of 2025, she became Professor Emeritus of Gender and Cultural Studies. The years of the Covid pandemic were an especially difficult time for Elspeth as she cared for Sarah Donald, her beloved long term partner, who was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 2019 and passed away on 6 May, 2024. Even in these trying circumstances, Elspeth remained actively engaged in departmental and supervisory activities as well as research collaborations, often through Zoom. Elspeth spent the last weeks of her employment as a full-time professor in 2024 transferring her voluminous collection of books to the hallway outside her office where they were offered freely to colleagues and students who wanted them. ‘There are some real gems of feminist, queer, cultural studies as well as on food, eating and oceans,’ she wrote in an email announcing their availability to the department. ‘Many would be terrific for teaching plus for research. Pls do take them. It’ll be “my archive” reassembled amongst you’. And in a later Reply All email, ‘Dig in everyone’.
Professor Kane Race FAHA
University of Sydney
